Smart card power analysis platform design and implementation
Yang Yong-sheng · Journal of Tsinghua University(Science and Technology) · 2012
Power analysis is an effective method to count side channel attacks.The attacker does not need to have full knowledge of the chip but by only monitoring the power traces can recover the secret key within the chip,which poses a great threat to the security of smart cards.A power analysis platform designed to test smart card security.The platform consists of a PC,oscilloscope,card reader,transfer card and corresponding control and analysis software.This system communicates with the smart card and continuously records the power traces.With a sampling rate of 200 M Sa/s,the platform can record 2 400 traces per hour.This paper focuses on the optimal design of the transfer card,which can increase the system SNR about 3.8 times so that the number of traces needed to recover the secret key of a triple data encryption standard(TDES) smart card can be reduced from 80 000 to 40 000.Another TDES smart card needed only 12 000 traces to recover the 128 bit secret key.Thus,this power analysis platform can be used to analyze smart card security.Expansion of the hardware and software will enable the platform to also perform electromagnetic analyses of smart cards.